August 16, 2006, 5:54 PM PDT
Facebook launches API and bill-sharing service
Posted by: Andrew Gruen

Remember the Billmonk bill-sharing service we posted about a few weeks back? Well now it has some serious competition in the form of FaceBank, the first application to take advantage of Facebook's new API. As of now, FaceBank is pretty underdeveloped, but is has a huge advantage in that virtually every college student (the obvious targets for bill-sharing services) already has a Facebook account.

Using FaceBank is a bit confusing. The service is designed around the concept of lending to and "mooching" from friends organized in groups called piggy banks. A bank is a group of people you define by selecting from a list of your Facebook friends. FaceBank keeps track of all the loans within a piggy bank and will minimize the number of transactions required for the entire group to settle up. For example, if I owe Noah $20, and he owes Matt $20, FaceBank will instruct me to pay Matt $20 and mark both debts as settled. Entering a loan or a mooch consists of selecting the person you owe or owes you from a list and entering the dollar amount with an optional description of the credit or debit.

Unfortunately, there's no way to enter a large bill and split it between multiple people; instead shared costs must be entered as a loan, forcing you to do the division to determine how much each person owes. There's also no way to select more than one friend at a time when entering a loan or mooch, nor is there a mechanism to limit the friend list to the particular piggy bank you're in at the moment. Another obvious missing feature is the ability to turn a pre-existing Facebook group into a piggy bank.

Though it's undoubtedly rough around the edges, with a bit of development--from Facebook themselves or a third party developer with the API--it could dominate the college micro-loan and bill-sharing market.

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August 16, 2006, 12:55 PM PDT
Early birds go all-in for free with Texas Hold 'Em for Xbox 360
Posted by: David Rudden

The Xbox Live Arcade service for the Xbox has been big business for Microsoft, and the company shows no signs of slowing down after the retro-themed summer lineup. Starting next Wednesday, the defacto day for new XBLA releases, another string of original games will hit the system. The most notable release on the docket is next week's debut of Texas Hold 'Em, which will be free to download for its first two days on Xbox Live. After that, it'll run you 800 Microsoft points--roughly 10 real-world dollars. After that, Konami gets into the retro arcade fun with two of its older titles rolling out in the two following weeks: Scramble and Time Pilot, which will run 400 points each. Yeah, we haven't heard of those, either.

Source: GameSpot

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August 16, 2006, 11:44 AM PDT
Blu-ray news: some good, some bad
Posted by: Matthew Elliott

First, the good news: If you are among the small minority to have purchased a Blu-ray drive, or if you just like keeping tabs on format wars, you'll be happy to know that Sony's dual-layer 50GB discs are headed for U.S. shores. In fact, some of the discs may have already arrived: J&R Music now lists the discs as "in stock" and ready to ship in "one to two business days." Cost per disc: $39.99.

Now, the bad news: a Sony product manager stated last week at an event in Sydney, Australia, that the company's first Blu-ray drive for the PC, the BWU-100A, won't play commercial Blu-ray titles. You're stuck playing just your own recorded content for the time being, thanks to the lack of updated hardware and software. HDCP-compliant graphics cards aren't out yet, and there aren't any retail playback apps for Blu-ray drives that can decrypt HDCP. (An OEM version of WinDVD supposedly can handle HDCP, but it's currently available only as part of the bundle with a Sony laptop.) Add this fact to the list of reasons of why you should hold off buying a next-gen optical drive.

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August 16, 2006, 10:37 AM PDT
Nintendo Wii: November, $250, no nickel-and-diming
Posted by: Molly Wood

USA Today is reporting, after an interview with Nintendo president and COO Reggie Fils-Aime, that the Nintendo Wii will not include extra fees for its online gaming component (here's lookin' at you, Xbox Live!). Reggie still won't say anything specific about timing and price, but USA Today is confirming the oft-repeated November 2006 and less-than-$250 storyline. Wow, at less than $250 with no crazy upgrade packages, hidden fees, or maddening online subscriptions, "new level" packages, or "marketplace" options, how can a company even expect to stay in business?!

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August 16, 2006, 10:23 AM PDT
McAfee challenges Consumer Reports survey
Posted by: Robert Vamosi

As noted here a few days ago, venerable Consumer Reports has published the results of its own security software testing in its September 2006 issue. Now esteemed security vendor McAfee has published an open letter challenging Consumer Reports' methodology. Indeed, I raised my eyebrows when I saw that Consumer Reports had tested antivirus heuristics by creating 5,000 new variants of existing viruses to see how well the products performed at stopping new viruses. McAfee cites a long list of antivirus researchers who are on record saying that creating new viruses is not an acceptable practice in testing antivirus performance, and McAfee points to credible third-party sites, such as AV-comparatives.org, for more sound antivirus testing methodologies.

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August 16, 2006, 10:21 AM PDT
Microsoft patch may crash IE
Posted by: Robert Vamosi

Some users applying one of the latest Microsoft patches, MS06-042, a cumulative security update to Internet Explorer, have reported that the browser will crash when viewing certain Web sites. Microsoft says the problem occurs when IE users view Web sites that use version 1.1 of HTTP alongside compression. In particular, people running PeopleSoft applications that have Web-based interfaces have noticed this problem. For more details, see this CNET News.com article.

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